I gave an early 9-10.15am keynote presentation to the trendy young filmmaker folk at SPAA fringe on Saturday. It was received well by all who I spoke to and on the grapevine. It was sympathetic to the many case studies shown by Peter Broderick in his two sessions highlighting a range of filmmakers selling DVDs off the web and direct to fans. My talk though looked more specifically at social connection and examples of new form media that went beyond ‘flogging’ the linear video story or doco, or just reaping the benefits of cutting out the middleman. I was keen on trying to get under the skin of what new forms are being developed by the audience themselves – this will be developed in a further post. But…

It was clear that the fringe crowd have moved beyond web 1.0 (brochure sites promoting theatrical or TV), many are half way into web 2.0 (starting to share and discuss) so, introducing the concepts of trust’onomics (tm), web 3.0, (the live and immersive web) and instant communication with communities of interest, did not fall on deaf ears – as it would have done last year.

Laurel Papworth (who was winging her way to Singapore at the time) and I also worked up a simple (albeit complex looking) social media marketing campaign diagram to focus on a few simple phases and steps.

INVOLVE – live the social web, understand it, lurk, listen, this cannot be faked

CREATE – make relevant content for communities of interest

DISCUSS – no conversation around it, then the content may as well not exist

PROMOTE – actively, respectfully, promote the content into the networks

MEASURE – monitor, iteratively develop and respond or be damned!

Related to this I was surprised by the number of film people who I spoke to at SPAA, who now ‘get it’. They have come to realise the need to engage and surround themselves with experts in this field, helping them develop strategies, hand-hold them through the technology. I was not shy in saying that they need to choose their advisors carefully – not be swayed by marketing hype from new kids on the block or traditional web companies – who are suddenly experts! Effective social network marketing comes from deep understanding and experience of communities and how they operate and what motivates them – not the ability to fiddle with facebook groups, learn a few catch phrases or make cute viral YouTubes. Implenting a campaign the wrong way and you will get your fingers seriously burned, and rather than only being ineffective, have no results it can actually have a negative impact if not handled with empathy and integrity…anyway enjoy the slides above and the ‘simple’ SME Marketing diagram below…

23 Responses to “The Future of Social Media Entertainment”

Great talk Gary. I appreciated your simple distillation of the complex world of social media. And I was just beginning to lament the lack of discussion around audiences at SPAA Fringe when you swooped in Saturday morning. A nice alternative viewpoint to Peter Broderick who looks at digital from more of a producer perspective rather than that of the audience.

Many thanks Kate – got a good response and probably timely – audiences are often left off the radar in media conferences. Tried to make social media marketing as practical as poss, like early web, there is often a mystic, a black art that puts some folk off. This is simple networking really, but one needs to learn the culture and language before you set foot in it and use ‘the locals’ – online specialists. Peter Broderick certainly showed some of the results of filmmakers who are learning and getting audiences, often through a willing to fail attitude, they learn quickly 🙂

That picture with “you” in the middle of that web is spot on. To my mind, we can do so much with social capital, er entertainment. Crazy to think that some day your social activity could be evaluated and taken as a stand in for a credit score but I could see the day.

Anyway, It seems to me that the act of being more and more social online can actually make it more and more difficult to transfer analogue relationships to digital ones. I mean with all those usernames… how could you possibly share them cleanly with a person, much less a web social newbie. That act of initiating social interaction, the introduction, is increasingly difficult with the ever adding new profiles. There are a couple services out there that stream in content from all the other places but to my mind that is a bit of a mix of potatoes and pie. Both are good but maybe not in the same spoon full.

I built a page of just my links for myself and started sharing that one place. Soon others came to me asking for a page like mine. So, I started http://www.extendr.com , in order to easily allow anyone to build a page of links to all their other pages. Then it makes it easy to share, even grandma could do it, and it makes it easy to introduce your online self to anyone. In doing so it actually empowers the audience to decided on what level they want to interact. Talk about being user, and/or audience focused.

Maybe the extendr concept is spot on and will help toward the goal of this post and posts like it, namely to explain and invite people into social activity online so that social capital can be created and managed. I am not sure though for in the end the community needs to decide if it is valuable or not.

Thanks Joseph extendr.com looks like a great idea but then I can imagine suddenly a few aggregator sites popping up alongside openID and then we will have to manage our aggregation sites too (assuming one doesn\’t do all)…I am already in this position with a few sites that may do 7 2D social networks but leave out all the 3D based ones, or ones that just do game based logins etc etc: I also think a page of links of the digital you is a great start (I used wikipedia for that also, then delicious and all the other bookmarking options), but what I am really looking for a profile/login aggregator that merges all the many and various facets of yourself in one place, and more importantly which feed off each other (friendfeed kind of thing) which is the other side of the fence.

Gary, Thanks for checking out extendr.com. I totally see the critique about aggregation of aggrigation. I don\’t want to go there. I don\’t see that as where this is going.

I can see your desire to have all your stuff aggregated. I think the insight here is that aggregation like you\’re talking about is about interaction. It\’s about you looking at your activity or people who know your activity looking at your activity. We have an explosion of interaction so we are all trying to wrangle the fire hose. But what about introduction? I think we\’re missing a crucial step.

.extendr.com is about introduction. Rather than just showing activity it might be appropriate to indicate and contextualize all the activity one has. Say for instance, you don\’t post pictures for a while but that is part of your aggregator. If I come to your aggregator I don\’t see that you post pictures or do anything other that what you have been recently doing. Google is going to find you but why make everyone you know search for you? We all don\’t have the time to spend 15 mins searching for and introducing ourselves to people we meet online. Why not give people one place to introduce ourselves where all our stuff is and then empower them decide where they want to interact? Further, for people who don\’t understand aggregation, still the large majority of the population much less understand RSS, streams of content are poor at introduction.

Whatever is used for online introduction, it seems to me that there is an opportunity to do it better for the person who does not yet know the person being introduced.